4th of July Travel Log

So for the 4th of July, Becca, Joe (NASA), Ashley, and I hopped in Joe’s car and drove west. No plans. No goals. No objectives. Sort of The Way by Fastball style.

It was pretty freaking awesome. We used Jessie (my GPS) to find a few interesting things to do, and ended up going to the Edgar Allan Poe museum in Richmond, VA. Well, the gift shop at least. We spent a good 10 minutes being excited about the gift shop and all its novelties (and postcards!), and then realized we hadn’t even gone into the museum yet. But then we realized it isn’t free, and it isn’t really cheap, so we moved on to a new location.

So down the street was the Virginia Holocaust Museum. It was free, so we actually went through all of it. It was very very impressive and well planned. At one point, there was an underground railroad type tunnel thing that you crawl through to get the feel of escaping from the Nazis. So I’m crawling in first, and it is pitch black, and my crazy mind starts imaging things like some psycho hiding in the tunnel to kill unsuspecting visitors, when suddenly I hear a scream, and so I scream and jump back like 37.5 feet and look like a complete wuss when it was just Becca going the wrong way through the tunnel. I almost wished it was a psycho killer guy so that at least I’d have an excuse for the jumping back in fear thing. Oh well. Anyways, no postcard here, as they were all rather depressing and stark.

So we hopped back in the car, and off we went to nowhere. Eventually we ended up at a pizza place, where Becca spit all over the pizza and I got a picture in front of a street sign that said “hussey”. Good times.

So next we went to Monticello, which is some Thomas Jefferson thing. Becca fell up (and then down) some stairs, so it was a short visit. Okay, so maybe the $15/person also discouraged us from actually visiting the place, but we got postcards!

Next we went to Charlottesville. Got some pictures of a Robert E. Lee monument and walked around there amazingly lame tourist area. Not the best part of the trip. Like seriously, even their tourist bureau building thing was closed. Very lame.

So we quickly left and ended up at the Blue Ridge Parkway. We picked a hike and tried to go on it, but couldn’t find the trail head, so we picked a different trail that was 1.5miles and off we went. It was nice, until we got to the end of the 1.5mile trail and discovered that the trail we were on lead to other trails. What a waste of walking. So we walked back to the road, got a few pictures of the view, and drove on.

Our last stop was at a Chinese restaurant. The food wasn’t amazing, but by that time we were pretty beat so any food that wasn’t individually wrapped was pretty tasty.

On the ride home we even got to see quite a few fireworks.

Anyways, that was my holiday. If you get the chance, take a few friends and drive nowhere. You’ll be surprised how much there is to do when you don’t try to plan ahead.